“These experiential musings led me to create an interactive artwork for the Emerge festival at Arizona State University on Friday, March 7. (Disclosure: Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, ASU, and the New America Foundation.) The goal of Emerge is to make the dry and abstract “future” into something immediate, personal, and tangible, that you can get your hands on. This year’s theme is “The Future of Me”: How much agency will we, as individuals, have in the near future? Will the networks bend every effort to learn our every quirk and serve our every whim? Or will we be like an illegal migrant, who lacks civil rights and a legal ID, a guy with a lot of “future,” but not much “me?”

“My contribution to Emerge this year is a border machine, “Mi Futura Frontera/My Future Frontier.” The installation is powered by open-source software and is arranged to be at least as complex as a typical customs declaration. It’s a whirling tower of cultural images, surrounded a jittery pair of marionettes. These polite border-crossing migrants do their best to obey the gestures of the viewer of the artwork. Like most of us in the passport office and the customs waiting queue, they’re doing the best to go through the motions. But they’re puppets of a system that isn’t built for their benefit, and reactions can get out of hand.

” “Mi Futura Frontera/My Future Frontier” is about trans-national clichés. It’s about that whirlwind of superstition and stereotype that gusts up whenever you step from one legal realm to another. On the far side of a border-crossing is the soil of another nation. There’s another culture there, offering the potential prospect of another, future “me.” No matter how quickly you return from such an experience, you’re not quite the same guy. …”